The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [41]
When you begin any meeting with real data and hard facts, the sales material at the end of the meeting has a lot more credibility.
Because we have control over the material covered, it artfully unseats every type of competitor we have. For newspapers, this would be the yellow pages, TV, radio, and so on.
It created brand loyalty.
If someone gives you something of value, you want to give back. People who saw this orientation wanted to advertise, if only to honor the devotion of the newspaper that provided such useful information.
Part of the education taught the importance of consistency in your advertising. This addressed another strategic problem the newspapers were having. Folks would try advertising once and, if it didn’t yield results immediately, they would pull out. This program taught that it takes time to build a presence in the eye of the community.
It made people feel that advertising in the community newspaper was almost a moral obligation to support your community. “The more support we have, the more programs like this we can bring to the community.”
The expert and strategically designed presentation made selling idiot-proof for the salespeople. The sales reps went around to business owners with a three-ring presentation binder that stood up on the desk. They flipped through the panels and showed the information to all the prospects. I recommend using PowerPoint whenever possible, but the point is that every rep had the same material to present.
The presentation says every thing the top management would want every prospect to hear and know. Most sales organizations leave 90 percent of the sales process up to the rep.
It made the reps smarter. Even if some reps weren’t using the exact material provided, it gave them insights on business success that they never had before. This automatically made them more consultative in their selling.
So even if it’s not practical for you to go out and start doing educational seminars for your prospects, you should build a stadium pitch that has every possible piece of data you can put in there. Then you can have a contest with your salespeople to give them the incentive to memorize the information. Arming your salespeople with powerful insights will dramatically elevate their status in the eye of any buyer. Implementing a comprehensive program like this, however, can elevate you to a level where virtually no one can compete with you.
How This Could Fail: The Tactical Executive
Even after building this elaborate program and explaining it to every one with a national rollout, we still had salespeople who responded: “You’ve got to be kidding me. Why would I go through all that when all I really want to do is sell advertising?”
And you will have those reps working for you, so let’s go at it another way. What is your strategic position? Madison Avenue ad agencies and many others call it your USP (unique selling proposition). The problem with this thinking is that it’s focused on you. It asks the question, “What is special about us or what do we have or do better than our competitors?” In addition to this internally focused approach (which is the minimum every company should know), you should also know that your best possible ultimate strategic position is to devote yourself to helping your clients succeed. So this newspaper company might go from a Madison Avenue–style unique selling proposition of “reaching more people in the community daily than any other media source” to an ultimate strategic position of “helping businesses and consumers in our market live better lives.” This is an example of going from being focused on yourself to being focused on your buyer. In the more strategic USP I give, we focus not only on the advertisers but also on the readers. This is a broader, more outwardly focused USP.
Going Deeper
Now it’s time to further implement the education-based marketing approach. This requires absolute pigheaded discipline and determination.